Paul Bartel’s Goofy, Garish, and Gay Western Lust in the Dust Gallops to the Music Box on March 26 on 35mm

Monday, March 26 @ 7:00 PMLUST IN THE DUSTDirected by Paul Bartel • 1985
One of the most overlooked talents to come out Roger Corman’s AIP director mill, Paul Bartel never demonstrated the interest in pursuing Hollywood filmmaking that so many of his cine-brat compatriots did, continuing to make the sort of unfashionable, high-concept, and decidedly independent B-pictures his peers had long since abandoned well into the ’90s. Bartel’s Western-comedy Lust in the Dust may have been advertised as something akin to a queer Blazing Saddles, but in its ambling, affable way, it is far more faithful to the genre’s B-movie roots than most of the Westerns produced during the revisionist heyday. Reuniting gay icons Tab Hunter and Divine, previously seen together in John Waters’s Polyester, Lust in the Dust is ostensibly concerned with a love triangle between Hunter’s gunslinger Abel Wood, Divine’s chorus girl-cum-prostitute Rosie Velez, and saloon-owner Marguerita (played by Barbra Streisand’s understudy Lainie Kazan, who, in her musical number “South of My Border,” steals the whole damn movie). There’s some nonsense about a search for gold, but Bartel is most excited just to play in his genre sandbox, trying on tropes (the New Mexico-shot vistas are a particular highlight) and casting off any useless seriousness. (CW)
84 min • New World Pictures • 35mm from Allan Glaser
Film Stock: AGFA
Presented with Chicago FilmmakersShort: “The Secret Cinema” (Paul Bartel, 1966) – 35mm – 30 min“The Secret Cinema” has been newly restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation with funding provided by The George Lucas Family Foundation.